I hate to use backup applications. There, I said it. This is because:
- Many use proprietary/weird formats for backing up data.
- Backing up is always easy and this ease is advertised but recovery has never been easy.
- I don't really want to handle the overload of applications settings/features/tools/services whatnots just for a simple backup.
Since I use Ubuntu on daily basis, I tried Deja Dup. As advertised, the backup process is painless. Soon I had snapshots of files for last 7 days. But one day when I tried to revert a file to a three day old snapshot the experience turned out to be horrible. It took insane amount of time to revert a 10kB file. If Deja Dup was not using its own format recovery would have been as easy as cp /path/to/backed/up/file /path/to/actual/file
. Even when backup softwares don't use their own format, the number of options/settings that they provide are useless for me. I don't need the cruft.
Any experienced Linux guy would have realised by now what I'm getting at. When